


Irezumi

by Elivira



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Character Study, Crimes & Criminals, F/M, Irezumi, Japanese Character(s), Japanese Culture, Organized Crime, Tattoos, Yakuza, japanese Yakuza
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 09:47:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12318555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elivira/pseuds/Elivira
Summary: Adam grows up with guns on the kitchen island and blood, dried brown and flaky, under his father's fingernails. He grows up in multiple properties across Japan and beyond, large men with irezumi dotting their skin stalking the hallways.





	Irezumi

**Author's Note:**

> Japanese Terms  
>  _Irezumi_ \- Traditional Japanese tattoo  
>  _Nagasode_ \- Full arm tattoo  
>  _Gobu_ \- 1/2 sleeve tattoo

In the beginning, Adam grows up with guns on the kitchen island and blood, dried brown and flake, under his father's fingernails. He grows up in multiple properties across Japan and beyond, large men with  _ irezumi _  dotting their skin stalking the hallways. Sometimes he watches as the tattoo master pokes the ink into their flesh, hand moving fast as he directs the needle. 

In the beginning, his father hires a driver to take him to school and the man waits all day, silent as he smokes on street corners or in the sleek, dark car outside the school.  Adam can see the colorful lines of a  _ nagasode _  peeking from under the man’s long sleeve. No one dares to say it where they know Adam can hear, silent in their fear, but he still hears the word spoken when he's out of sight.

" _ Yakuza _ ," they whisper. 

In the beginning, Adam grows up knowing that he will inherit an empire, one built on murder and thievery and all that entails, because no matter what Hiro Noshimuri wants for his son, Adam knows he will follow in his father's footsteps. 

Adam spends his childhood with his father trying to hide the truth from him, but Adam is not stupid and has always known to some degree. Adam grows up with the knowledge of what a gun feels like in his hand and how a man looks when he truly fears for his life. 

His father urges him away from the family business and Adam goes to college in America. Easily accepted to the University of Hawaii, and, for the first time in his life the word  _ Yakuza _  is not whispered when his back is turned. This, Adam thinks, is his way out, out of the inheritance that he never wanted to begin with. 

It lasts. For years, he runs mostly legitimate businesses and ignores the glimpses he gets of darkly tattooed men and any strange actions in his company's accounts. Plausible deniability and all that. He is, after all, still his father's son. 

One night, after the finals of his sophomore year he finds an out of the way tattoo shop and sits down with an artist. The owner is an old Japanese man, his face lined with age, back hunched from years of bending over, and Adam enjoys the feel of Japanese flowing off his tongue as they speak. 

"My father is  _yakuza_ ," Adam tells the man who raises his eyebrows but says nothing and Adam chose this place because he can see the dark ink of a  _gobu_ tattoopeeking from underneath the man's sleeve; the sleek scales of a snake curled around the old man's weathered bicep, "but I am  _not_ ," Adam finishes, as if, somehow, the words will make it true. 

He goes home with the burn of a fresh tattoo on the skin stretched around his ankle, a Japanese style carp swims there, black and white and glistening with ointment. 

In the end, his father goes missing and Adam had always known he could not escape his inheritance. That night he pulls his handgun from his safe, cleans it, loads it, and double checks the chamber. 

In the end, Adam cleans up, falls in love with a wonderful woman, so full of life and the knowledge that he can be good.  Do good things and be the man his father had wanted him to be. It's not enough. 

In the end, he embodies everything his father had never wanted for him, dressed in prison orange and looking at his wife through the bulletproof glass of a visitation room. 

 


End file.
